Today's links: Housing sales, Chinese strikes, Goldman snark

The housing market seems to be moving slowly back to normal, with fewer distressed sales, says Calculated Risk. The total share of distressed sales — short sales and foreclosures — have fallen nearly in half in areas like Las Vegas and Phoenix. And that’s good for new single-family starts and construction, says Bill McBride. “I expect several years of increasing single family starts and completions,” he writes.

Chinese workers are deciding that maybe social security is a good thing. According to the Associated Press (via Business Insider) 30,000 workers at a Taiwanese-owned shoe factory in Dongguan want the company, Yu Yuen Industrial, to make social security contributions as required by Chinese law. The workers had earlier settled for higher daily wages without the contributions.

“In the past, they did not understand the system or trust it, and they would prefer not to pay social security but receive more in cash,” said Wang Jiangsong, a leading scholar on labor issues at the China Institute of Industrial Relations.”Now the aging migrant workers are seeing they have little income when they retire to their rural villages.”

Yahoooooooo!Yahoo’s former CEO, Henrique de Castro, got $58 million in 15 months on the job. Shareholders are filing suit.

A Google attorney bought an apartment building in San Francisco and allegedly evicted all its tenants, including a school teacher, so he could have the place to himself. This has not gone over well.

Who says a multinational investment banking behemoth doesn’t have a sense of humor? From Dealbreaker: When The New York Times called Lloyd Blankfein “the former” CEO Goldman Sachs, it issued a correction – because, after all, Blankfein is the current CEO. This morning, there was this on @GoldmanSachs: